Global Future (HERE) have published a paper asking if the price of Brexit is too high. Cleverly, they have used the government's own figures from the official impact assessment leaked to Buzzfeed in January this year. This famously didn't assess the impact of the government's own preferred solution (amazing in itself!) but GF have interpolated the figures based on Theresa May's Mansion House Speech on 2nd March where she allowed us a glimpse of what this mysterious scenario is.
Based on the figures it is possible to see that "every possible scenario – including a 'bespoke deal' – will leave Britain poorer and cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds per week".
- EEA Option £17 billion extra borrowing, £262 million per week
- FTA Option £57 billion extra borrowing, £877 million per week
- WTO Option £81 billion extra borrowing, £1250 million per week
- Bespoke Option £40 billion extra borrowing, £615 million per week
Bear in mind the EU are unlikely to acceded to all our "bespoke" demands and so the final figure will probably be between £615 and £877 million per week in extra borrowing (or higher taxation).
Armed with what they say is a "menu with prices" they then used Populus and a sample of 2068 people to see what they thought about the Brexit options.
In particular we asked whether they thought the overall cost of each deal represented ‘too high a price’ to leave the EU. In addition, we asked Leave voters whether each deal represented a deal that was as good or better than they had hoped for when casting their vote, or worse. In both cases the results were emphatic:
• Leavers and the public at large reject every Brexit deal modelled by government, and ministers’ own preferred scenario (EEA, FTA, WTO, a bespoke deal), as Too High a Price to leave the EU by enormous majorities.[the EEA option by 83%, FTA and WTO by 87% and even the bespoke deal by 77%]
• The vast majority of Leavers regard each deal as worse than they had hoped when voting to Leave the EU.
• Finally, we asked voters, if forced to choose which deal they would like to leave the EU both Leavers (narrowly), and the public at large (by a significant distance), chose the EEA model (the so-called Norway option) as their preferred deal of those on the table.
So, one can conclude people are far more rational than Brexiteers give them credit for. Brexit was only attractive when the prices were hidden, now the true figures are coming out it's clear that enthusiasm for the extreme options is waning and even the bespoke deal doesn't seem to have anything like majority support.
And while the government is pursuing a hard Brexit by leaving the single market and customs union, people are actually far more pragmatic and prefer the EEA option over any of the others. It seems to me Brexiteers have much the harder job in trying to convince people that going over a cliff edge won't hurt. All we have to do is keep sending out the same message - it will.
